Joan Kagan of Triplemint Real Estate helped New York City sellers and buyers achieve their 2021 real estate goals despite the challenges presented by the unprecedented and unpredictable NYC market. What a year it has been!
Hi, everyone, this is Joan Kagan from Triplemint. While 2021 has been an unbelievably challenging year with global crises like COVID and climate change and political turmoil in our own country, it has been a blockbuster year for real estate. I’d like to thank my clients who put their faith and trust in me to broker their most important transactions, and I’d like to thank my colleagues in the real estate industry for creating an atmosphere of cooperation and collaboration to make deals happen for our clients. Now, let’s take a look at a few of my favorite deals from the year.
Morningside Heights Prewar Building
This is a lovely prewar building in Morningside Heights. There are apartments that are beautifully decorated by decorators, but there’s something really special when the sellers or the owners have really amazing taste and have curated this beautiful apartment, this beautiful home with art and objects and furniture and color. And that’s what happened with these sellers. They had amazing taste. The most exciting part about this deal was that the buyers were this lovely couple with an adorable three year old daughter, and the husband brought her to the final walkthrough, which was the first time she saw the apartment. He walked into the door with her on his shoulders. He put her down on the floor. She had never seen the apartment before, and she ran down the hall through all the rooms, giggling and dancing and shouting with glee. It was so infectious we were all into it and enjoying her reaction. And in that moment, I could visualize this little girl growing up into an older girl, doing her homework and playing and bringing friends home and growing into a teenager in this apartment and returning home from college, hopefully remembering the very first time she saw the apartment and really having that permanent feeling of home during a stressful period of many transactions. For me, that moment reminded me why I do what I do and why I first got into real estate, which is to help people create the sense of home of permanence in their lives, where the home is like a character in the screenplay or the novel of their lives.
Prince Street, Soho
This was a fun Soho loft. It had all the cool, quintessential Soho loft stuff. There were brick walls and tin, high ceilings and exposed pipes. One of the complications with the deal was that the apartment was in reasonably good condition. It had been renovated prior to this owner without proper approvals. So there’s this one bathroom that leaked into the apartment below, which happened to be owned by the board president, who is in the midst of a huge renovation. When the seller purchased the apartment, he had signed a document stating that he would have the bathroom renovated, so there would be no more leaks. He never did the renovation, and he only used the second bathroom in the apartment. But I had to disclose to all interested parties that they would need to renovate the bathroom before moving in.That was what the board requested. The eventual buyer wanted to do a renovation anyway. And the board members had informally offered that the buyer could submit his plans for renovation before he closed. That’s not typical. Most of the time you have to wait until you’re an actual owner before you submit your renovation plans, but they made that offer so that he could speed up the process. They didn’t say, however, that the plans would be approved before he closed, so he was refusing to close until he had plans approved by the Co-op board and the building engineer. We had to have a few tough conversations with him to make sure that he would close on time and he did. The deals are never simple. There’s never a straight line process. There’s always a curveball or a complication or something. That’s why you needed a good broker. And that’s why I like the challenge of it.
114th Street, Morningside Heights
This is 114 Street. I actually sold a few apartments in the building this year. This apartment was the definition of great bones. There is beautiful pre-war architecture, high ceilings, and sunshine. This is the south facing view from the living room and dining room. There is a large windowed kitchen. It feels like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It’s also in Morningside Heights, and it had been with one family for over 50 years. It had been meticulously maintained. The floors were in excellent condition. These are all original and the walls and the moldings. They didn’t have layers of paint like is typical of a lot of the older apartments, so they were in really good condition. The appliances in the kitchen had been removed, but the top the original sink from 1910 was still there, as were the original metal kitchen cabinets on top, and they were in such pristine condition they could have been in a museum. You can’t believe that somebody was living there for 50 years. I listed the week before Thanksgiving in 2020. I had a bunch of appointments scheduled as it was a really desirable apartment at a great price point and then my son was diagnosed with COVID. He’s fine, thank God, but I had to quarantine him as I have been exposed to him and I scrambled to have other agents cover all these showings for me and I was negotiating multiple offers from my bedroom. But we got it done and I think the first time I saw it with the buyers, we were in contract already.
East 86th Street
I sold this apartment to the sellers a few years earlier, when she was single, it was an Echo studio. She reached out to me in late 2019 to tell me that she was engaged and that they wanted to purchase a junior four in the neighborhood. She would need to sell this apartment first in order to make the purchase, but didn’t want to list until they had found the perfect apartment that they wanted to move into. So we made a plan to prep the apartment for sale. We got photos and floor plans and had a description, so we just had to click a button when we were ready to list. And then, of course, COVID happened. I feel like there’s a COVID story to every single listing this year. We stayed in touch during the lockdown. They stayed in the Echo Studio, both working from home. They got married as scheduled and called me a few months later to tell me that they were expecting a baby. I love when my clients do that, it’s the best reason to move. So they wanted to move out before the baby arrived. We listed in January of 2020. There was a snowstorm for the first two Sundays, so all of our open house appointments got cancelled and we got a low offer in a week. The market was just starting to shift then, and the agent for that buyer and the buyer who really wanted the apartment told me that he could not in good conscience advise the buyer to go any higher. I thought that he was giving his client bad advice because the market was changing so quickly and we had an offer at the asking price a week later.
Thank you for taking this trip down memory lane with me. It’s really unbelievable how much has happened and how much has changed in a year, and it’s amazing how the epidemic had an impact on all of these transactions. I’m looking forward to a 2022 filled with a lot more exciting, fun and beautiful listings and transactions and wishing you and your family and the people you love a peaceful and productive and prosperous and healthy 2022. Happy New Year!
To work with Joan Kagan, contact her at 917.992.9433 or via email at joan@theagencyre.com.
